It does not appear that many of these Celtic words attained a very permanent place in the English language. Some soon died out and others acquired only local currency. The relation of the two races was not such as to bring about any considerable influence on English life or on English speech. The surviving Celts were a submerged race. Had they, like the Romans, possessed a superior culture, something valuable to give the Teutons, their influence might have been greater. But the Anglo-Saxon found little occasion to adopt Celtic modes of expression and the Celtic influence remains the least of the early influences which affected the English language.
It is believed that Denmark was largely settled by Germanic people from present-day Sweden in the fifth and sixth centuries. Their language became the mother-tongue of present-day Scandinavian languages. By 800, a strong central authority appears to have been established in Jutland and the Danes were beginning to look beyond their own territory for land, trade and plunder.
Norway had been settled over many centuries by Germanic peoples from Denmark and Sweden who had established farming and fishing communities around its coasts and lakes. The mountainous terrain and the fjords formed strong natural boundaries and the communities remained independent of each other, unlike the situation in Denmark which is lowland. By 800, it is known that some 30 petty kingdoms existed in Norway.
The sea was the easiest way of communication between the Norwegian kingdoms and the outside world. It was in the eighth century that ships of war began to be built and sent on raiding expeditions to initiate the Viking Age, but the northern sea rovers were traders, colonizers and explorers as well as plunderers.
Prior to 1000, details of Swedish events are obscure. It is known that there were two tribes in the country during Roman times: the Suiones (Swedes) in the north Svealand; and the Gothones (Goths), in the south (hence called Gothia).
CONCLUSION
The importance of a language is inevitably associated in the mind of the world with the political role played by the nations using it and their influence in international affairs; with the confidence people feel in their financial position and the certainty with which they will meet their obligations i.e., pay their debts to other nations, meet the interest on their bonds, maintain the gold or other basis of their currency, control their expenditures; with the extent of their business enterprise and the international scope of their commerce; with the conditions of life under which the great mass of their people live; and with the part played by them in art and literature and music, in science and invention, in exploration and discovery in short, with their contribution to the material and spiritual progress of the world. English is the mother tongue of nations whose combined political influence, economic soundness, commercial activity, social well-being, and scientific and cultural contributions to civilization give impressive support to its numerical precedence.
The English speech is one of the significant world languages today in the world, perhaps taking the first place by the number of its speakers. It is a language of Germanic groups of languages, spoken in United Kingdom, USA, Australia, New Zealand, India, and many other parts of the world. Today this language is becoming a dominant means of communication, and it is not surprising that millions of people are more and more paying time and money to learn this language. Thus many people go to the trouble of learning English in order to be able to communicate with the native English speakersor in some cases, with each other.
By family group, English belongs to the Anglo-Frisian group within the western branch of the Germanic languages, a sub-family of the Indo-European languages. It is related most closely to the Frisian language, to a lesser extent to Netherlandic (Dutch-Flemish) and the Low German (Plattdeutsch) dialects, and more distantly to Modern High German. Its parent, Proto-Indo-European, was spoken around 5,000 years ago by nomads who are thought to have roamed the South-east European plains.It is inevitable that a language like English, spoken by so many people scattered from one end of the world to the other, should have many varieties, differing rather widely from one another. The most obvious varieties are regional dialects, some of which go far back in history. Three main stages are usually recognized in the history of the development of the English language.
We are so accustomed to think of English as an inseparable adjunct to the English people that we are likely to forget that it has been the language of England for a comparatively short period in the world's history. Since its introduction into the island about the middle of the fifth century it has had a career extending through only fifteen hundred years. Yet this part of the world had been inhabited by man for thousands of years, 50,000 according to more moderate estimates, 250,000 in the opinion of some. During this long stretch of time, most of it dimly visible through prehistoric mists, the presence of a number of races can be detected; and each of these races had a language. Nowhere does our knowledge of the history of mankind carry us back to a time when man did not have a language. What can be said about the early languages of England? Unfortunately, little enough what we know of the earliest inhabitants of England is derived wholly from the material remains that have been uncovered by archaeological research. The classification of these inhabitants is consequently based upon the types of material culture that characterized them in their successive stages. Before the discovery of metals man was dependent upon stone for the fabrication of such implements and weapons as he possessed. Generally speaking, the Stone Age is thought to have lasted in England until about 2000 b.c., although the English were still using some stone weapons in the battle of Hastings in 1066. Stone, however, gradually gave way to bronze, as bronze was eventually displaced by iron about 500 or 600 B.C. Since the Stone Age was of long duration, it is customary to distinguish between an earlier and a later period, known as the Paleolithic (Old Stone) Age and the Neolithic (New Stone) Age.
Paleolithic Man, the earliest inhabitant of England, entered at a time when this part of the world formed a part of the continent of Europe, when there was no English Channel and when the North Sea was not much more than an enlarged river basin. He was short of stature, averaging about five feet, long-armed and short-legged, with a low forehead and poorly developed chin. He lived in the open, under rock shelters or in later times in caves. He was dependent for food upon the vegetation that grew wild and such animals as he could capture and kill. Fortunately an abundance of fish and game materially lessened the problem of existence. His weapons scarcely extended beyond a primitive sledge or ax, to which he eventually learned to fix a handle. More than one race is likely to be represented in this early stage of culture. The men whose remains are found in the latest Paleolithic strata are distinguished by a high degree of artistic skill. But representations of boar and mastodon on pieces of bone or the walls of caves tell us nothing about the language of their designers. Their language disappeared with the disappearance of the race, or their absorption in the later population. We know nothing about the language, or languages, of Paleolithic Man.
Neolithic Man is likewise a convenient rather than scientific term to designate the races which, from about 5000 b.c., are possessed of a superior kind of stone implement, often polished, and a higher culture generally. The predominant type in this new population appears to have come from the south and from its widespread distribution in the lands bordering on the Mediterranean is known as the Mediterranean race. It was a dark race of slightly larger stature than Paleolithic Man. The people of this higher culture had domesticated the common domestic animals, and developed elementary agriculture. They made crude pottery, did a little weaving, and some lived in crannogs, structures built on pilings driven into swamps and lakes. They buried their dead, covering the more important
Members of society with large mounds or barrows, oval in shape, but they did not have the artistic gifts of late Paleolithic Man. Traces of these people are still found in the population of the British Isles, especially in the dark-haired inhabitants of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. But their language has not survived among these people, and since our hope of learning anything about the language which they spoke rests upon our finding somewhere a remnant of the race still speaking that language, that hope, so far as England is concerned, is dead. In a corner of the Pyrenees Mountains of Spain, however, there survives a small community that is believed by some to represent the last pure remnant of the race. These people are the Basques, and their language shows no affiliation with any other language now known. Allowing for the changes which it has doubtless undergone in the centuries which have brought us to modern times, the Basque language may furnish us with a clue to the language of at least one group among Neolithic Man in England.
The first people in England about whose language we have definite knowledge are the Celts. It used to be assumed that the coming of the Celts to England coincided with the introduction of bronze into the island. But the use of bronze probably preceded the Celts by several centuries. We have already described the Celtic languages in England and called attention to the two divisions of them, the Gaelic or Goidelic branch and the Cymric or Britannic branch. Celtic was the first Indo-European tongue to be spoken in England and is still spoken by a considerable number of people. One other language, Latin, was spoken rather extensively for a period of about four centuries before the coming of English. Latin was introduced when Britain became a province of the Roman Empire. Since this was an event that has left a certain mark upon later history, it will be well to consider it separately.
Toone unfamiliar with Old English it might seem that a language which lacked the large number of words borrowed from Latin and French which now form so important a part of our vocabulary would be somewhat limited in resources, and that while possessing adequate means of expression for the affairs of simple everyday life would find itself embarrassed when it came to making the nice distinctions which a literary language is called upon to express. In other words, an Anglo-Saxon would be like a man today who is learning to speak a foreign language and who can manage in a limited way to convey his meaning without having a sufficient command of the vocabulary to express those subtler shades of thought and feeling, the nuances of meaning, which he is able to suggest in his mother tongue. This, however, is not so. In language, as in other things, necessity is the mother correspondence between the c and h was according to rule, but that between the t and d was not. The d in the English word should have been a voiceless spirant that is in 1875 Verner showed that when the Indo-European accent was not on the vowel immediately preceding, such voiceless spirants became voiced in Germanic. In West Germanic the resulting 8 became a d, and the word hundred is therefore quite regular in its correspondence with centum. The explanation was of importance in accounting for the forms of the preterit tense in many strong verbs. The formulation of this explanation is known as Verner's Law, and it was of great significance as vindicating the claim of regularity for the sound-changes which Grimm's Law had attempted to define.
The English language has undergone such change in the course of time that one cannot read Old English without special study. In fact a page of Old English is likely at first to present a look of greater strangeness than a page of French or Italian because of the employment of certain characters that no longer form a part of our alphabet.
A second feature of Old English which would become quickly apparent to a modern reader is the absence of those words derived from Latin and French which form so large a part of our present vocabulary. Such words make up more than half of the words now in common use. They are so essential to the
Expression of our ideas; seem so familiar and natural to us, that we miss them in the earlier stage of the language. The vocabulary of Old English is almost purely Teutonic. A large part of this vocabulary moreover has disappeared from the language. When the Norman Conquest brought French into England as the language of the higher classes much of the Old English vocabulary appropriate to literature and learning died out and was replaced later by words borrowed from French and Latin. An examination of the words in an Old English dictionary shows that about 85 per cent of them are no longer in use. Those that survive, to be sure, are basic elements of our vocabulary, and by the frequency with which they recur make up a large part of any English sentence. Apart from pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, auxiliary verbs, and the like, they express fundamental concepts like mann (man), wif (wife), did (child), hüs (house), benc (bench), mete (meat, food), gsers (grass), leaf (leaf), fugol (fowl, bird), god (good), heah (high), strong (strong), etan (eat), drincan (drink), libban (live), feohtan (fight). But the fact remains that a considerable part of the vocabulary of Old English is unfamiliar to the modern reader.
The third and most fundamental feature that distinguishes Old English from the language of today is its grammar. Inflectional languages fall into two classes: synthetic and analytic.
The language of a past time is known by the quality of its literature. Charters and records yield their secrets to the philologist and contribute their quota of words and inflections to our dictionaries and grammars. But it is in literature that a language displays its full power, its ability toomuch lyric and didactic poetry, and numerous works of a scientific and philosophical character. It is still cultivated as a learned language and formerly held a place in India similar to that occupied by Latin in medieval Europe. At an early date it ceased to be a spoken language.